Silver Screams: The Convent (2000-dir. Mike Mendez)

When the first Hot Topic opened in 1989 it was hard to find band t-shirts, or even black clothing, at your average mall. The goth and punk teen sub-cultures had been growing through the 80's but every pair of winklepickers, every tube of black lipstick, was the result of an arduous search, a grueling quest to paint yourself in opposition to the glossy pastels of the Reagan era. You might have read about ...If I Die, I Die in a zine and for years just had to imagine what it sounded like before ever coming across an import copy. The friction was part of the appeal, but it also meant thousands of weirdos never got access at all. If they never had that cool older sibling or that one friend who smokes cloves to show them the way they would miss out on art and culture that could change their lives forever.

It's undeniable at this point that a landscape of infinite access has radically devalued all art & culture, probably forever, but I was born in 1987 and cannot shake my nostalgia for the Hot Topic of the 00's, which at that point had fully commoditized and franchised counter-culture cool into easily digestible teenage fast fashion. At the age of 16 that big wall of band shirts, proudly displaying Kurt Cobain's face in between hardcore bands that considered him a sell-out and bubble-gum pop-punk groups he'd probably despise, was a tantalizing buffet of potential identities. Am I more punk or metalhead today? What kind of metalhead? Slipknot or Lamb of God? I was a timid dweeb as a teenager, neither goth nor mall goth, not punk or even poser, but there was a comfort in knowing Hot Topic was there should I ever work up the nerve to wear a t-shirt that would make my parents mad. I have space in my heart for mall goths and posers and other earnest suburban wannabes who bought their middle fingers to society with their parents' credit cards.

The Convent (2000) breaks no ground, often highly derivative of films that were themselves highly derivative, a throwback to Night of the Demons (1988) which itself was posing as an American answer to Demons (1985) which of course swipes a lot from The Evil Dead (1981). But it has the earnestness of a mall goth, an adolescent glee that is undeniable from the very first scene: set in 1960, in a sequence staged like the panels of a comic book, we watch a badass Catholic schoolgirl, Ray-Bans on, cigarette hanging out her mouth, bust into a convent's mass and start laying waste to all the clergy taking communion. Nuns get beaten to death with baseball bats, turned into twirling fireballs with a can of gasoline and the girl's lit cigarette, priests are blown away with a shotgun, all to the soundtrack of Leslie Gore's "You Don't Own Me". It's a hell of an opening, the kind you can imagine two resentful Catholic school students (which both director Mike Mendez and screenwriter Chaton Anderson were) dreaming up while smoking schwag in a Denny's parking lot. It's tempting to say it plays differently now in an era of weekly American mass murders but of course that was part of it then too: if, in the wake of Columbine and hysteria over the "Trench Coat Mafia", schools and other authority figures wanted to profile and crackdown on all the weirdos with long hair and Marilyn Manson t-shirts then the opening of The Convent (2000) offers itself up as a crude rejoinder, a fantasy of cathartic violence against systems of control that want to kill everyone's good time.

These juvenile concerns linger when we jump forward 40 years and are introduced to a slate of characters who are all working desperately to forge their identities in the eyes of their peers, as if nothing could be more important than where you land on the punk/prep spectrum. Our protagonist is college student Clorissa (Joanna Canton), a former punk who is trying to hide her rebellious past to fit in with her new sorority and frat friends. Her little brother Brant (Liam Kyle Sullivan) is a timid dweeb unsuccessfully trying to become cool by impressing the guys from the frat he's rushing. Her former best friend Mo (Megahn Perry) is a proud snarky goth who despises all the preps she's surrounded by and occasionally dips into Chandler Bing cadences when delivering sarcasm. Later in the film we meet a coven of wannabe Satanists who desperately want to be recognized as masters of evil in between shifts at the Dairy Queen. And, standing out among the frat guys, we have Frijole (Richard Trapp) who incessantly deploys black vernacular to assert himself as the Alpha and Omega of Clinton-era hipster white boys.

There is a school of thought that says slasher movies should be populated by assholes, since the audience is only there to root for their gory ends anyway. The issue is that a slasher movie is only going to be, at best, 1/4 bloody murder, which means that most the runtime is going to be spent just hanging out with the characters. The popularity of reality TV suggests that plenty of people are happy to spend time with total assholes if it means they can hate them guilt-free, but I'd almost always opt for a slasher where I want the characters to live and I feel something about seeing them die. I want to root for Vickie to hook up with the hot guy in the wheelchair in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), I don't want to watch Melissa be an jerk to everyone in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988). But there is something to be said about a superbly sketched piece of shit, characters like Walter Peck in Ghostbusters (1984) or Ellis in Die Hard (1988), and Richard Trapp's performance as Frijole is wholly on that level for me. With his gelled hair, earrings and gas station shirt, his drawn-out affected speech patterns and clumsy black slang delivered with a shit-eating smirk, his brain that can only focus on sex and drugs, Frijole is like Woodstock '99 made flesh and stands as an elemental example of a certain kind of douchebag, forever preserved on celluloid. File the performance in the reference section, if you ever want to know what it was like to interact with a frat guy in 2000, look no further.

You've already seen me name-drop Night of the Demons (1988) so you can probably guess the set-up: this vivid group of young assholes want to party at the abandoned haunted convent from the opening. But quickly they get busted when the cops, a surprisingly fruitful comedy pairing of Bill Moseley and Coolio, show up and send them away after shaking them down for their weed. After the muted response to his 1997 album My Soul, Coolio's music career was pretty much over and he was in his famous-for-being-famous phase, doing tons of cameos and bit parts in DTV movies including Leprechaun in the Hood (2000) (which also shot on some of the same sets as The Convent [2000]) and he's a lot of fun here playing the unhinged bad cop to Bill Moseley's dry, needling good cop. Moseley was a genre movie fixture by this point, memorable in films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) and Night of the Living Dead (1990) but it's worth mentioning that, while not yet the cult favorite Rob Zombie would make him in House of 1000 Corpses (2003), all the casual condescending cruelty of his role as Otis is already fully-formed here.

Goth hellraiser Mo has priors and can't risk an interaction with the cops, so the group leave her behind in the convent only for her to be kidnapped and sacrificed by a nerdy group of Satanists (clearly inspired by comedy sketches like Kids in the Hall's "Simon & Hecubus" and SNL's "Goth Talk") calling themselves The 13th Coven. When the group return to the convent to retrieve Mo (and a stash of Frijole's weed) they discover that The 13th Coven successfully summoned a gaggle of demons and the spook-a-blast antics ensue. It's here where The Convent (2000) comes to life, proudly wearing it's influences like a teenager wears a Static-X shirt. The aesthetic is like a nu-metal music video in an amusement park haunted house, Sam Raimi meets Joel Schumacher, all undercranked cameras and blacklights, fluorescent paint and kaleidoscopic editing. The demons twitch and convulse at 12 fps, the eerie marionette body language of the deadites of The Evil Dead (1981) replaced with Jacob's Ladder (1990) shock cuts that had begun to trickle out into the mainstream vernacular via music videos like Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People" or Dark Castle Entertainment films like House on Haunted Hill (1999). But the enthusiasm is high, with gore gags like one Satanist floozy getting her tongue bitten off, another being doused in boiling water or a demon getting impaled through the back of the head with a flashlight, all accompanied by geysers of glowing red, pink and orange blood.

Frijole is too busy being high on shrooms to notice anything funky is going on, his impressively accurate mushroom trip accompanied by a fucked-up & awesome detuned rendition of Gary Wright's "Dreamweaver" as he hangs out with flying CGI panties and a talking crucifix Jesus who implores of him "Yo, get me down from here motherfucker!" But when the demon-form of Mo shows up to give him head you know the scene can only end with him getting his dick bitten off. No one has ever received a blowjob in a horror movie without paying for it. This is the kind of movie you signed up for, featuring nothing you'd call a proper scare but plenty of moments you'd call a real good time.

Eventually Clorissa escapes the convent but with her brother Brant still trapped inside she seeks help from the one person capable of stopping the demonic threat: Christine, the badass schoolgirl from the opening, now played by Adrienne Barbeau doing her very best Snake Plissken impression. Nowadays casting a horror flick with convention autograph-row stalwarts is as likely to elicit eyerolls as not: we've all been burnt by too many crappy Adam Green movies that promise to finally unite the thespian talents of Kane Hodder and Danielle Harris or whatever. But back in 2000 Adrienne Barbeau had been out of movies for a decade (the last thing genre fans would have seen her in was Two Evil Eyes [1990]) and Mike Mendez wisely doesn't ask her to do anything outside her range. She was always a beautiful tough-talking badass, even as far back as The Fog (1979), so a shotgun-toting demon-slaying biker broad is right in her wheelhouse.

Christine clears the rumors surrounding the nature of the haunted convent and her 1960 killing spree in a delightful expository montage, telling the tale of an evil presence slowly taking over the nuns at St. Francis Boarding School with a series of gnarly kills (my favorite is one nun on a motorcycle dragging another down the sidewalk with a rope) until the whole school is run by shark-toothed demons in habits, administering corporal punishment with spiked paddles, covering students in The Exorcist (1974) split-pea vomit, and trying to steal Christine's newborn baby for their ritual to summon The Antichrist. You see, it takes the sacrifice of a virgin to properly summon The Antichrist so rather than let them take her baby Christine just murdered them all. Unfortunately, Clorissa's geeky brother Brant is most definitely a virgin ("you just ooze virginity" one character observes), so the summoning of the Antichrist remains a possibility. Naturally, this leads to a Sam Raimi suiting-up montage as Clorissa and Christine arm themselves for a final showdown.

The climax of the film is little more than a series of gore gags and comic book posturing as Christine and Clorissa mow down countless demon nuns, decapitating them, blasting their heads apart at point blank range, smashing their skulls with heavy wooden doors, racing to save Brant and the final remaining 13th Coven member Dickie-Boy (a slightly cringe-worthy gay stereotype nonetheless given some depth and nuance by future drag star Kelly Mantle) from their fates as virgin sacrifices. Brant gets free but Dickie-Boy gets the dagger to the back and begins a rapid placenta-bursting transformation into The Antichrist, a nipless pig-nosed gargoyle that looks like Nosferatu's scrotum. Luckily even Satan Incarnate is flammable and Christine gets one final Ripley in Aliens (1986) moment where she throws a molotov cocktail at it, blowing up the entire convent once and for all. Clorissa and Brant wander out of the rubble, blackened with ash, peering into the daylight, a lit cigarette hanging out of Clorissa's mouth now that she's been restored from fallen sorority sister to her rightful punk status. Here the reference is a little Heathers (1988) meets From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). There's always a reference.

The Convent (2000) got a huge response in a midnight slot at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, a fast-paced crowd-pleasing banger of a variety that had been scarce throughout the 90's. But heavy cuts from the MPAA and a botched release by a distributor that immediately folded upon acquisition meant that it's legacy was mostly forgotten until a recent home video restoration from Synapse. It's not uncommon for filmmakers to chase the freewheeling energy of The Evil Dead (1981) but it is rare for imitators to feel so joyful. Sam Raimi and his cohorts were breaking rules and forging new cinematic languages, true cinematic punk pioneers giving the genre a 10,000 watt jolt of X-rated electricity. Mike Mendez and Chaton Anderson were not real punks, the transgressions of The Convent (2000) are largely safe and codified, but they were earnest. In a direct-to-video landscape of cynical cash-grabs they had conviction and, like any good mall-punk, a well-curated selection of tees

Next on Silver Screams...Bloody Murder (2000)